“Hello, Bob!… Captain Tyler, Christine … my granddaughter, Christine Storm.”

She would smile up at him. Good-looking. But then, all men looked handsome in a pilot’s uniform.

He would look ardently down at her, unaware that he was looking ardent; a wife at home and three kids and that was that. Quite a dish, though. Black eyes and they slant a little … I wonder … no … golden hair … maybe a paint job … no, that’s genuine Alaska gold hair.

“Would you like to come up forward and have a look around, Miss Storm?”

Thor Storm had planned carefully, carefully. South Alaska first, the accustomed comfort and even luxury of Juneau, with the Alaska Legislature in session, embattled, serious; the reactionary and the liberal locked in combat.

She had seen Anchorage, sparkling, gay, modern, a city of homes, shops, libraries, museums, hotels, parks that seemed magically to have sprung complete, overnight, from a tent town.

From Juneau they had bounced over to Sitka in a tiny amphibian that rollicked its start through the waters, lifted itself, an audacious speck of metal over the menacing ice-sheathed mountains. They had no sooner been plumped down in the harbor than Chris began to say, “I remember! I remember!” as though she had been there before.

“Remember?” Thor said, mystified.

“Everything you told me. What was I? Eight? Nine? Ten? Anyway, I remember it all. When it was the capital of Alaska for a whole century. And the Russians. And Baranof that our town was named for. That seems strange now, doesn’t it? And then Seward’s Folly, and the Russian flag coming down and the American flag going up! Like a movie or something. But it seems real to me, just the same. Maybe because I’ve remembered it so long. All my life.”

“All your life,” Thor repeated, smiling down at her. He was happy. It was like renewing his youth, just to watch her. She stood wide-eyed before the altars of the old Russian cathedral with the vestments and icons and vessels of a long-gone day. In the little chapel of Our Lady of Kazan was the painting of the Madonna and Child framed in silver repoussé. Chris nodded her head as if in affirmation of a familiar object.

They visited the Old Pioneers’ Home where old, old men were living out their lives in physical comfort and inner rebellion. They had fought the Alaska wilderness in their youth, they had lived with danger, old age had seemed a distant thing, they had not realized that this was the one inevitable danger they never could conquer. In their faded eyes was a look of puzzlement.

Thor seemed to know them all, they greeted him, croakily, with a kind of admiring affection. They crowded round him and Christine felt a moment of panic as though they might somehow, by their very numbers and their eagerness, take him with them into their now futile lives. Thor brought her into the tiny neat private room of the Oldest Pioneer. His hair was absolutely white and very clean, and his eyes were curiously bright and blue and Christine wished they were not so merry. They made her uneasy. He was courteous to her, but distant, not interested. The crumpled face was pink and white, like a baby’s.